The Dinosaur Knights (8 page)

Chapter 5

Marchador
, Ambler
,
Palfrey
—A horse trained to a gait called “ambling”: a smooth yet rapid and tireless-seeming walk. The favored traveling mount of those who can afford them, for their price can rival a war-trained courser's.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“Back away,” Longeau shouted, dragging Violette around the table. The other Council members fled, leaving Bogardus alone on the dais, his handsome oblong face a blank. “Stand back or I'll paint the room red with her blood!”

She went along in an uncharacteristically passive way. Rob had often seen that reaction among folk the first time they had sudden personal violence directed against them. Of course, most people Rob knew had that experience at an age much less than Violette's, no matter what that actually might be.

Longeau might have hauled his hostage out the nearby door that led to the kitchen. But instead he pulled Violette toward the center of the dais, causing the front rank of onlookers to scramble frantically over each other to get away from him. Clearly he wanted, not escape, but an audience. Seasoned performer that he was, Rob had frequently found himself compelled to choose between those exact same things.

Bloody amateur, was his assessment of Longeau's pick.

Rob and Karyl stood their ground. Rob wondered at Karyl's reaction.
After all, she's the most persistent thorn in his ass
, he thought.
In both of ours
. Himself, Rob would only regret to see her cut out for the fact it was done by the handroach traitor.

“Please, Bogardus,” Longeau moaned, looking up at the other man. To Rob's amazement tears streamed down his face. “You know why I had to do this.”

To the hall at large he said, “You can't know, you mustn't know—pray the Creators, you never know … oh, terrible beauty. The secret rituals of power. And the cost; ah, the cost; I feel it in my belly even now. You know, Eldest Brother.”

“Enough, my friend,” Bogardus said softly into the terrible silence. “Give me the knife and we'll end this.”

“End this?” He uttered a wild laugh. “That was what I hoped. Our only hope. I thought I'd save us from ourselves. I couldn't see any other way. The power, the terrible majesty … that inhuman beauty, too great to quit or to endure. Lady Violette, you know. Don't you? Don't you? Everything I've done I did for you. For us. For our souls. Souls. For everybody's soul!

“I didn't do it for the silver, but for
deliverance
. For all of us, I swear by the Creators! Crève Coeur's ravagers are kinder than what is to come.”

“Shut up, you fool,” hissed Violette.

Longeau sighed. His shoulders slumped. He pressed a fervent kiss on his hostage's lips, which went visibly slack from shock.

“At least I can save you from yourself,” he murmured. The knife blade withdrew ever so slightly from Sister Violette's pale neck as he cocked his arm to thrust.

At his eye's edge Rob saw a flash. In quick succession he heard a swoosh, a sort of wet crunch, and a thud.

Then blood was spraying in an amazing fan from the stump of Longeau's knife-arm, just below the elbow. It drenched Violette instantly in red. Screaming, onlookers whom curiosity had sucked back up toward the dais jumped away, upsetting a table into jingling silver and shattering crockery to escape the blood-fountain.

Near him stood Karyl, holding his staff-sword's wooden hilt in both hands. The rest of the staff, which served as concealing scabbard, lay on the tiles a couple of meters away. Howling in terror Violette tore herself free of Longeau's suddenly slack grip. Placidly Karyl flicked his meter-long single-edged blade to clear it of blood, and wiped both sides with quick strokes against Longeau's smock.

Rob reeled as Sister Violette ran straight into his arms, of all places. Lean as she was she proved surprisingly substantial, and wirier than she looked. Unable to think of anything better to do he patted her tentatively on the back.

He jerked his hand away. It was sticky-red with Longeau's blood.

With eyes like boiled onions Longeau stared at his gushing stump, and at the rest of his arm, which jerked like a landed fish on the maroon floor tiles. Pallid fingers still clutched the knife.

“Strike me dead,” he said, almost wonderingly.

“I have,” Karyl said, turning away and bending over to retrieve the scabbard. “You've perhaps two minutes left with that artery severed.”

Longeau gaped at him. His eyes rolled up and he slumped to the floor. The crowd watched, shocked to silence.

“Shouldn't we help him?” Absolon asked after a moment.

Slowly Bogardus came around the table and stepped down from the dais to stand looking down at his friend. The pulses of blood from his wound grew visibly weaker with each repetition.

“Why?” Bogardus asked sadly. “To preserve him for the noose? This is a kinder death, as well as a far more aesthetic one. He'd choose it himself if he could.”

“What about those things he was saying, then?” Rob said. “All that about terrible beauty, and what was to come being worse than a marauding army?”

Violette pulled free. “A madman's ravings,” she said. “His desire to justify his actions drove him insane. To think I trusted him!”

She ran to Bogardus and threw herself against him. He embraced her with one arm, disregarding the blood that soaked her hair and gown.

“Who but a madman would trust Crève Coeur enough to bargain with them?” he said. “A sad case, my friends.”

He reached up, took a spray of fresh forest flowers from a vase on the Council table, and tossed them on the body.

Rob frowned.
That doesn't sound right,
he thought.
But then, nothing here does.
He felt questions pressing outward on his skin, but for the moment even he couldn't quite fit words to them.

At a sign from Bogardus husky townsmen came and picked up Longeau's now-lifeless body. Cradling Violette against his chest, Bogardus watched them carry him out the door to the kitchen.

“Ah, my friend,” he said sadly. “That it had to come to this.”

He gave a final hug to the shaken Councilwoman and helped her sit on the edge of the dais. Then he turned to the address the hall at large.

“Now, my brothers and sisters, hasn't the time come to apologize to these gentlemen, and confirm them in the roles we have given them? Which, we've now seen, they've carried out with exceptional skill and courage.”

But the Councilors, standing off by the left end of the dais, tossed nervous looks around among themselves, like hot embers.

“Things are complicated, Bogardus,” said Iliane, who had shown no active hostility to the outlanders—if no overfriendship either. “We've seen and heard some horrible things tonight. Things I never imagined I'd witness have disturbed our hall's serene beauty. You can't ask us just to wave our hands and pretend nothing's happened.”

“No, Sister,” Bogardus said, smiling sadly. “What I ask is the opposite: take note of the frightening things we've experienced, and act accordingly.”

But the surviving Councilors wouldn't meet his eye.

Rob sidled close to Karyl. “It's a brave show we've put on, any must admit,” he murmured. “But now we might think of edging toward the door and exiting stage left.”

“Salvateur!”

The woman's voice rang off the rafters. Everybody jumped and turned to stare at the rear of the hall.

Stéphanie stood there, still naked and spear in hand. Her magnificent body and scarred face streamed rain. Her eyes were wild and fierce as a hunting horror's.

“Salvateur!” she shouted. “His riders are fast approaching down the west road! While you loll around here on your fat butts listening to fools and liars, your enemy comes to burn your towers around your swollen heads!”

*   *   *

Melodía raised her face to the morning sun shining through the perpetual daytime overcast. She inhaled deeply.

“It smells as if something died,” she said,

They rode up a river valley, wide, flat, and shallow, in the county of Métairie Brulée near the border of Providence. The river itself, currently more a stream, wound through marshes and stands of thin, pale-green weeds. The valley's most remarkable feature was the limestone islands, each about five meters tall, which dotted it. These had flat tablelike tops and white sides scooped and smoothed into shiny concave waves by water.

And, perhaps, the wind that quested ceaselessly down from the mountains. The Shields were close enough now to be visible most of the time as a blue wall. Despite altitude and the breeze off the perpetually snow-clad peaks the morning was hot, the overcast seeming no thicker than a vast linen sheet. Unusual numbers of birds and big fliers circled overhead; Melodía kept a wary eye on these, although none seemed large enough to be true dragons, hence dangerous to full-grown humans.

Aside from wrinkling their noses the young women paid the smell no further thought. Death was commonplace, after all.

“Tell me one thing, Pilar,” Melodía said.

“Anything, Melodía.”

Melodía insisted that Pilar refrain from calling her Highness, and was trying to break her from using honorifics of any kind. They were both outcasts, now. Outlaws together. And friends—a fact Melodía found herself clinging to with a certain desperation, the more so for having recently recovered it after losing it so long ago.

“Where'd you learn to speak Francés so well?”

That skill had served them well on that chance encounter with the bandit-hunters in Licorne Rouge, and several times since, when Pilar had used the same ruse to talk their way past other wayfarers. She had also used them to buy some feathered twist-darts.

Melodía had put the bow to good use shooting small game for the pot, and it could help defend their camp. But Melodía couldn't shoot at all well from horseback—horse archery was an incredibly abstruse skill, and Melodía gathered you practically had to be raised to it to be much use, like the wild steppe-nomads of Ovda. She was fairly proficient throwing darts from the saddle, though, enough to discourage bandits or other minor predators.

She now rode with a quiver of half a dozen darts by her right knee. Like the smallsword they wouldn't raise eyebrows among those the women encountered. It was common for servants to go armed to protect their masters against the bandits that infested the roads.

Melodía and Pilar hadn't run into any actual bandits yet. For which Melodía thanked her luck. After her traumatic experiences in La Merced she was even less inclined than before to believe in the Creators.

“Where'd I learn Francés? Why, the same places you did, naturally. Didn't I sit in on all your lessons from girlhood on? And your conversations with the Lady Abigail Thélème? I got to practice, sometimes, with lesser folk I met in the course of my Palace duties. Which gave me a firmer grip on the tongue, if not exactly its courtlier aspects.”

Melodía laughed. Quickly she sobered.
How did I come to take her so much for granted, this childhood friend of mine? For ten years at least I've been no more aware of her than of my own shadow.
The thought made her feel sticky and cloddish.

Pilar's face rumpled. “Ay, that smell—” she said.

The stink seemed to have suddenly redoubled. Overt before, now it battered Melodía's head and shoulders like an inflated bladder at some riotous Mercedes street carnival.

“Mother Maia, what died?” she exclaimed. “A titan?”

They came around a rock-island like a white mushroom, swinging wide to clear a big clump of debris, limbs and brush and the like, which the last flood had left stacked against its upstream side, and saw what caused the smell.

“Good call,” Pilar said. “That's certainly a titan. And it's most definitely dead.”

It lay like a ridgeline athwart their path and the stream itself. Sunlight glinted on the temporary pond it had made by damming the flow. It had been a big one, a true matriarch, a good thirty meters long. What kind it had been was unclear: its body was blackened and grotesquely swollen. All Melodía could tell was that it was some fur-legged monster, such as a spine-back or thunderbeast, though not a treetopper. She could see no sign of the rest of what had probably been a goodly herd of enormous dinosaurs. The sandy, weedy soil, frequently washed by rain and river-rises, wouldn't hold tracks for any length of time.

“We have a problem,” Pilar said, reining in her ambler.

Melodía stopped Meravellosa beside her. The mare kept an ear cocked back toward the gelding-marchador, which followed Pilar's mount on a lead, lest it try to sneak a nip at her fanny.

“So we do,” Melodía said.

Vast as it was the titan would take no more than a minute or two to ride around. In life the plant-eater had been too huge for any predator to bring down, except perhaps tyrants operating in a pack. Dead, by accident or starvation or festering wound, it provided a bounteous feast that drew every predator of every size from kilometers around.

Hordes of meat-eating dinosaurs crowded around like trenchermen at table. Multiple generations of horrors jostled each other and perched on the high-arching ribs to snap in fury at scavenging fliers impertinent enough to try to land and rip off a beakful. Blues snarled and shrieked and flourished arm-feathers at reds that got too close to their territory, while greens nipped in to take advantage of their distraction, for all the planet like street gangs in La Merced's nastier slums.

Behind the horrors orbited packs of smaller harriers and little vexers, dashing in under their big cousins' terrible claws to snatch a bite and whip away again.

Even they stayed well clear of two matador packs that worked the hulk. Out of practical necessity the big horn-browed hunters had staked out either end: long neck and tail, and the body immediately adjacent. One clan was blue-green and yellow, the other a more unsettling blackish-red shading to tawny gold on their bellies. Both groups displayed the distinctive sharp striping, dark over light.